Managing Product Categories

What We'll Cover

A category is an organizational unit to which you assign your products. When viewing your store, customers will click on a category to view products that have been assigned to that category. You can also create subcategories within your category.

Categories are managed from Products › Product Categories.

If you're on a Plus plan or higher, you can use Customer Groups to control which customers can see which categories.

Creating a Category

The steps below show you how you can create categories in the Category area. You can also create a category when assigning it to a product.

1. Click Create a Category.

2. Enter the Name of your category. The other fields are optional.

Name — the category name as it appears in your store (limit 50 characters)

URL — the category URL (defaults to the category name if left blank)

Description — a WYSIWYG content editor that will appear at the top of your category page

Parent category — if this will be a subcategory, select the parent category

Template Layout File — the category template file

Sort Order — sets the priority in which the categories are listed; 0 is the default

Default Product Sort — set how you want products to be sorted within this category. You can keep the global setting frin Store Settings › Display (Category Settings) or set one for your particular category.

Category Image (subcategories only) — select an image to represent the subcategory on the parent category page (not supported by all themes)

3. Fill out the Search Engine Optimization fields if desired.

4. Click Save & Exit or Save & Add Another when done.

Editing a Category

To edit the above settings for an existing category, click the Action icon › Edit.

To change the order of your categories, hover your mouse over the category row, then drag the category up or down. Drag left or right to make a category into a subcategory or vice-versa.

To view the products assigned to a particular category, click the Action icon › Products.

To Disable or hide a category without deleting it, click the green checkmark to the right of the category. When it shows a red X, it has been removed from your store's category menu and will not come up even if someone goes to the URL.

Subcategories

A subcategory is a category that is a subset of a larger category. Subcategories are sometimes referred to as child categories, and the category they belong to is the parent category.

There are several ways to create a subcategory:

Create a category following the steps above, and select a parent category

On the desired parent category, click the Action icon › New Sub Category